A light-weight robot simulator for modular robotics

Abstract

Physical simulation are frequently used in robotics for evaluation of control strategies or planning techniques. In this paper, a novel, light-weight open-source robotic simulator is introduced. It provides both physical and sensor simulation and it was designed to be run in a headless mode, i.e., without any visualization, which makes it suitable for computational grids. Despite this fact, the progress of the simulation can be later visualized using external tools like Blender 3D. This brings advantage in comparison to more general and powerful simulators that cannot be easily run on such machines. The paper briefly introduces architecture of the simulator with description of its utilization in evolutionary modular robotics.